May 18, 2006
Civil Rights and Polls Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:50 AM EST Mr. Zeitz and I are just going to have to disagree about where to strike the balance between civil rights (which we both favor) and wartime necessity. I will content myself with noting that of those unalienable rights with which human beings are endowed by their Creator, Thomas Jefferson listed life as the first, for without it not much else matters. The grave is a very private place, but so what? (I am reminded of the classic Jack Benny routine where a mugger sticks a gun in his stomach and demands, “Your money or your life!” Benny raises his hands but just stands there. “Come on! Your money or your life!” the mugger demands again. “I’m thinking! I’m thinking!” responds the notorious tightwad. Tightwad on the stage, of course; in real life Jack Benny was boundlessly generous.) Needless to say, I don’t think Mr. Zeitz is in the least dimwitted. If I did, I wouldn’t bother to argue with him. But dimwits are not exactly an endangered species in the body politic as a whole or even among the chattering classes. Mr. Zeitz writes, “. . . a majority of Americans now believe that this President has consistently shown poor judgment, a patent disregard for facts and expert opinion, and an alarmingly casual relationship with the truth. He enjoys almost no credibility with the American public, which views his term in office as an unmitigated failure. (Don’t believe me? Look at the polls.)” Alarmingly casual relationships with the truth are commonplace in politics. The New York Times routinely refers to the NSA database that has recently caused such an uproar as “eavesdropping,” which it manifestly is not. Matt Lauer of the Today show calls it “monitoring your phone calls,” which it manifestly is not. And try to find a mention in the Times of how federal revenues have surged over the last two years, by about $500 billion. The Times’s famous motto is “All the news that’s fit to print.” Under Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., it should be changed to “all the news that fits our agenda we print.” I don’t think George Bush’s administration has a poorer track record than average in the truth department. It was his predecessor, remember, who “did not have sex with that woman.” That wasn’t a casual relationship with the truth. That was a lie. As for polls, there is no doubt that the President at the moment has very low poll numbers. But so did Harry Truman in much of his second term as the Korean War ground on in apparently endless stalemate. He is universally regarded today as a near-great president. President Clinton on the other hand had remarkably high poll ratings throughout his Presidency, even during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Perhaps that is because he didn’t do much that didn’t poll well. Low poll numbers might be a badge of honor for a President from time to time, evidence that he is doing things that are not popular but necessary and will be appreciated by history. But polls are very tricky things. If the question is bright-line (Are you voting for candidate A or candidate B?) and the poll well constructed so that the sample is indeed a representative one of the population as a whole, then they can be quite reliable. (Not always: David Dinkins, New York’s first black mayor, always did better in polls than in the voting booth. He was supposed to win in a walk over Giuliani in 1989; he squeaked to victory. He was supposed to win narrowly in 1993; he got clobbered.) But in polls where the question is necessarily more amorphous, the results are much less reliable and depend on exactly how the question is worded. The more complicated the subject, the less meaningful is any poll. Here’s an example. USA Today asked its sample, regarding the NSA database, “As you may know, as part of its efforts to investigate terrorism, a federal government agency obtained records from three of the largest U.S. telephone companies in order to create a database of billions of telephone numbers dialed by Americans. . . . Based on what you have heard or read about this program to collect phone records, would you say you approve or disapprove of this government program?” The result: 51 percent disapproved. ABC News asked this question: “It’s been reported that the National Security Agency has been collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans. It then analyzes calling patterns in an effort to identify possible terrorism suspects, without listening to or recording the conversations. Would you consider this an acceptable or unacceptable way for the federal government to investigate terrorism?” The result: 64 percent thought it acceptable. That’s a very big swing in the numbers, due, I imagine, almost entirely to the fact that ABC News gave a little more information about the program. Polls should never be taken as more than shadows on the cave wall. of course, the temptation to trumpet the polls that support what you want to be true is quite irresistible to left and right alike.
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